Are there none who will stay of all my sons? Must you all go?
Yes; all that you love, the pride of your eyes, Mother, you’d have it so.
Mangled and torn they lie in heaps, broken, dying and dead.
O scarlet blood of my splendid sons, you have dyed my green fields red.
What can I do for you, O my sons? My last, last gift is small,
A few poor sods to cover your heads and a scatter of snow o’er all.
Lay your head on the Earth’s breast and you will hear her crying,
Grieving, softly, hopelessly, for her sons who are dead and dying.
Celia Congreve
The seasons in war poetry
The seasons allowed both professional and amateur poets to express feelings about the dislocated world they now inhabited. Many women poeticized the contrast between a world in which seasons follow their natural rhythms and the events unfolding overseas.
LINES WRITTEN DOWN IN DEVON JANUARY 1915
Startling it is to see the snowdrops blossom,
Startling to hear the throstle, once more, sing,
As though this year our hearts were tuned to harbour
The sights and sounds we used to love in spring.
O blood-drenched, alien fields in France and Flanders,
O graves unknown where our young heroes lie,
You hold our vision, you are our present, actual-
The near is distant, the remote is nigh.
Ella Fuller Maitland
Through summer, autumn, winter/And through spring: The seasons in war poetry
Amongst the bleakest of winter poets is Edith Mary Cruttwell. She refuses to believe, let alone take comfort from the idea of soldiers willingly sacrificing their lives for those at home. Despite the British facing no serious engagements in February 1916, continuous trench raids, sniper fire, shelling, and sickness caused by living in the troglodyte world of the trenches, meant the death toll continued to mount. The men’s misery was unending, often intensified by seeing their comrades lying unburied in No-Man’s-Land.
Cruttwell is aware of the increasingly unbridgeable gulf between those at home and those in Flanders. Two familiar farmyard objects prompted the following thoughts in February 1916.
TWO SCARECROWS IN THE SNOW
Two scarecrows lay across the snow,
And I thought of the men across the sea,
Dark and silent and broken too,
They lie in Flanders for you and me.
Two scarecrows lay across the snow,
Broken and rent by the wind and the storm,
Ah, God, ’tis living bodies too
That lie in Flanders and cannot get warm.
The scarecrows lie, dead battered things; -
It seemed like a bitter blasphemy
(Like evil birds with tattered wings)
That they should lie for all to see,
And take in vain the name of War,
Too lightly have we passed them by,
The sacred name of our dead men
And those of them who still must die.
Those scarecrows, stark across the snow,
They are a cold, cold mockery,
They mock and mow and gibe at us
Who dwell in safety across the sea.
* * *
O bodies stiff, rest quiet now, –
– But give us from the battlefield,
O spirits loosed from ragged shroud,
The holy peace the snow can yield.
Edith Mary Cruttwell
The travesty of spring returning to a world at war provided American poet Sara Teasdale with the inspiration for this much anthologized poem. Rather than celebrate the arrival of spring with its promise of new life, she sees that it can only bring further horror. With increased hours of daylight the number of hours in which battles can be fought, and men can kill and be killed escalates.
SPRING IN WAR TIME
I feel the spring far off, far off,
The faint, far scent of bud and leaf—
Oh, how can spring take heart to come
To a world in grief,
Deep grief?
The sun turns north, the days grow long,
Later the evening star grows bright—
How can the daylight linger on
For men to fight,
Still fight?
The grass is waking in the ground,
Soon it will rise and blow in waves—
How can it have the heart to sway
Over the graves,
New graves?
Under the boughs where lovers walked
The apple-blooms will shed their breath—
But what of all the lovers now
Parted by Death,
Grey Death?
Sara Teasdale
Ethel Talbot Scheffauer’s Easter poem is disturbing, subverting both pastoral images and the promises of the Christian festival; her foul images help to drive her message home.
EASTER 1918
The Lord is risen - - when shall they arise
Whose pale accusing eyes
Glitter at night out of the marsh water
In the accursed lands?
In April come the flies,
Following greedily the great slaughter,
With their bright eyes of jet
And long tongues always wet
Following after the armies thick as sands.
And the birds come again - -
Not the small song birds, singing after rain,
But they of stealthy flight,
Following after the armies in the night,
The grey bird from the mountain in the east,
The vulture and the kite.
And the small worms awake - -
The little round worm and the slippery red,
They wake among the dead,
And gather up their numbers to the feast,
And drown in many a lake.
Where never a fevered beast his thirst may slake.
An evil, sullen pool - -
Whose waters draining down into the earth
Shall ready it for birth,
It is a rich grain, heavy and full,
Deep golden, long in the ear,
Shall strike its roots into this fallow ground,
When all the guns are still, in some strange year,
When no man shall be forced against his will
To lift the sword and kill.
Now in the land of fear,
Yesterday’s cavernous hollow is a mound
Slippery with new death.
The bells with iron breath,
Out of the cannon’s mouth utter their verse,
Not blessing but a curse:
Horror with blood upon her silken feet,
Walks at broad noon across the dreadful hill
Where all the torrents meet.
The Earth is bloody, like a murdered bride,
The Lord is risen - - it is Eastertide.
Ethel Talbot Scheffauer
Even for those with little more than a passing knowledge of the First World War, 1 July 1916 resonates with meaning. At the end of this first day of the Battle of the Somme, Britain had sustained some 57,470 casualties, of whom 19,247 were killed. Many were the volunteers who had responded with such enthusiasm to the recruitment drives of 1914 and 1915. By the time the battle petered out in mid-November 1916, British and Commonwealth forces were calculated to have lost 419,654 dead, wounded and missing.
Although news of the Somme disaster filtered home relatively slowly, it soon became apparent that, far from achieving the hoped-for decisive break-through, the battle had resulted in overwhelming carnage. Through the losses sustained by the Pals Battalions, the heart had been torn out of many villages and towns, leaving whole communities bereft of young men. Winifred Letts is one of several women who contrast the ripening summer fields of ‘happy England’ with the blood-drenched fields of the Somme.
JULY 1916
/> Here in happy England the fields are steeped in quiet,
Saving for larks’ song and drone of bumble bees;
The deep lanes are decked with roses all a-riot,
With bryony and vetch and ferny tapestries.
O here a maid would linger to hear the blackbird fluting,
And here a lad might pause by wind-berippled wheat,
The lovers in the bat’s light would hear the brown owl hooting,
Before the latticed lights of home recalled their lagging feet.
But over there in France, the grass is torn and trodden
Our pastures grow moon daisies, but theirs are strewn with lead.
The fertile, kindly fields are harassed and blood-sodden,
The sheaves they bear for harvesting will be our garnered dead.
But there the lads of England, in peril of advancing,
Have laid their splendid lives down, ungrudging of the cost;
The record – just their names here – means a moment’s careless glancing,
But who can tell the promise, the fulfilment of our lost?
Here in happy England the Summer pours her treasure
Of grasses, of flowers before our heedless feet.
The swallow-haunted streams meander at their pleasure
Through loosestrife and rushes and plumed meadow-sweet.
Yet how shall we forget them, the young men, the splendid,
Who left this golden heritage, who put the Summer by,
Who kept for us our England inviolate, defended
But by their passing made for us December of July?
Winifred Letts
Like many of her contemporaries, teenager Pamela Hinkson foresaw her own war-blighted future, her love and dreams buried beneath a stone.
A SONG OF AUTUMN
Was it only a year ago today
That you and I were happy, dear, together?
Not dreaming then how soon you’d haste away
And leave me lonely in the Autumn weather.
Not any more shall you and I go roaming
Along the hills we loved in wind and rain,
Stand in the storm to watch the wild birds homing,
Planning the future with no thought of pain.
Not any more shall you and I together
Wander along the sea-shore side by side,
Hearing the sea-gulls cry in stormy weather,
Yet knowing not the message that they cried.
Not any more shall we in bright June weather,
List to the streamlet running o’er its weirs,
As on that day when we two stood together
Not hearing in its music our own tears.
Not any more shall we in August weather,
Kiss the last kiss before I go alone
To tread the path which we two planned together -
My heart lies buried beneath a nameless stone.
Pamela Hinkson
If for Hinkson the autumn weather is reminiscent of all she has personally lost, Madeleine Stuart is aware how, in the first post-war autumn, the guns may have fallen finally silent but the physical and emotional burdens of the War continue.
AUTUMN IN ENGLAND 1919
I watch the reaper reaping golden corn
While the sun sets red and soft mists delay.
Where were you reaping, reapers, a year ago to-day?
I watch the reaper bind the sheaves at morn
While the haze hangs white on the moon’s pale horn.
Where were you binding reaper, a year ago to-day?
In the fields of Mars, on the great highway
With the reaper Death, where the wounded were borne
Like burning sheaves from a furnace caught,
And the mist was fire and the stricken brave
Like shadows crept out from that living grave
Blind … and life seemed death and death seemed naught.
And the fields were rank where the dead men lay
And that awful reaping ceased not night nor day.
Madeleine Stuart
Many poets construct their poem around just one season. For Beatrice Mayor summer, autumn, winter and spring represent the endless cycle of killing and dying, which for some on the Home Front seemed so far away as to be unimaginable.
SPRING 1917
It is spring.
The buds break softly, silently.
This evening
The air is pink with the low sun,
And birds sing.
Do we believe
Men are now killing, dying -
This evening,
While the sky is pink with the low sun,
And birds sing?
We do not.
So they go on killing, dying,
This evening,
And through summer, autumn, winter,
And through spring.
Beatrice Mayor
Conclusion: ‘Nature turns faint’
During and indeed after the War, women poets exploited the pastoral genre to show how it had disturbed all previous certainties. Their erstwhile secure island had been violated. Death had descended from now malevolent skies, as the enemy targeted civilians. Although some poets strove to believe that soldiers fighting on foreign fields had been comforted by thoughts of their beloved homeland, and in their dying moments had glimpsed in their imaginations ‘England, misty England’, other poets were unconvinced by such platitudes.
Women who never left their native shores, knew that the boom of the guns on the Western Front now audible in England were, as Enid Bagnold commented, a constant ‘reminder’ of what was happening across the Channel. The ‘guarding walls’ that Rose Macauley felt those at home had built around themselves were no longer sufficient. Sara Teasdale and a number of other poets noted how although spring heralded new life, it also brought greater opportunities for killing. For Ethel Talbot Scheffauer even Easter, the most hopeful of religious festivals delivered not the promise of Resurrection but the assurance of corruption.
In their pastoral poetry, women make it abundantly clear that death, destruction and despair now lurked on both the Home and the War Fronts.
Chapter 4
‘I’ve Worn a Khaki Uniform … Significant
Indeed’: Serving Women’s Poetry
During the Great War, over 100,000 British women joined the countless official and semi-official women’s organizations established (or extended) to assist the war effort, many formed by women themselves. Some volunteered for a few hours weekly, others spent years overseas; a substantial number were within earshot of the guns for longer than many revered soldier poets and writers. Most felt, in Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps poet I. Grindlay’s words, that their ‘khaki uniform’ was ‘significant’, a visible sign of their contribution to the war effort.
Women’s reasons for enlistment were varied: a number sought to escape hum-drum jobs or the boredom of their parents’ drawing-rooms; others were motivated by patriotism and the conviction that they should assist their country in her hour of need. Some enlisted to avenge a man’s death; some were pressurized by families keen to have a daughter in uniform, others defied their families by joining the embryonic women’s auxiliary services. Former supporters of women’s suffrage believed war service could hasten women’s enfranchisement; others felt that if man must fight then woman must nurse. For many working women, the rates of pay and the conditions offered by the auxiliary armed services were attractive, with the added benefit of liberating them from the drudgery of domestic service.
A few women found themselves inadequate to war’s demands, many discovered undreamed of reserves of character, courage and determination – and some also found that they could write poetry about their service, utilising the horror, humour, and even the mundane aspects of their lives.
Voluntary Unit poets
On 15 August 1914, when the War was only eleven days old, to the envy of their colleagues and indeed the majority of women, a small band of c
arefully selected uniformed women set off for the war zone. They were members of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS) and its Reserve, (QAIMNSR). In England, women who already held Red Cross Nursing certificates were desperately keen to don the uniform of one of the many volunteer corps, uniform being the visible sign of patriotism. For most, their ambition was, like that of male volunteers, to get to the war zone as quickly as possible.
Groups of well-meaning, privileged women, soon discovering that utter confusion reigned in the administrative midst of the Army Medical Service, founded and often funded their own volunteer units and simply went overseas independently to offer their services to Allied Medical Services. A number of them wrote poetry about their experiences ‘at the Front’ – not all of which was positive. Novelist May Sinclair’s disastrous spell overseas is the subject both of the poem below and her 1915 Journal of Impressions in Belgium.
DEDICATION
TO A FIELD AMBULANCE IN FLANDERS
I do not call you comrades,
You,
Who did what I only dreamed.
Though you have taken my dream,
And dressed yourselves in its beauty and its glory,
Your faces are turned aside as you pass by.
I am nothing to you,
For I have done no more than dream.
Your faces are like the face of her whom you follow,
Danger,
The Beloved who looks backward as she runs, calling to her lovers,
The Huntress who flies before her quarry, trailing her lure.
She called to me from her battle-places,
She flung before me the curved lightning of her shells for a lure;
And when I came within sight of her,
She turned aside,
And hid her face from me.
But you she loved;
You she touched with her hand;
For you the white flames of her feet stayed in their running;
She kept you with her in her fields of Flanders,
Where you go,
Gathering your wounded from among her dead.
Grey night falls on your going and black night on your returning.
You go
Under the thunder of the guns, the shrapnel’s rain and the curved lightning of the shells,
And where the high towers are broken,
And houses crack like the staves of a thin crate filled with fire;
Into the mixing smoke and dust of roof and walls torn asunder
You go;
And only my dream follows you.
That is why I do not speak of you,
Tumult and Tears Page 9